Vulnerability & College Access
Tobe Bott-Lyons
Going to college is scary. Every step along the way is fraught with danger, real and imagined. Am I good enough? Can I do it? Will I be accepted? Am I doing enough? What if I fail? What if I am making the wrong decision? Students must battle their own fears and doubts, as well as those of their families, friends, teachers, communities, and societies– pressures come at our students incessantly and from every direction. To make it worse, students on the college path must face these dangers steeped in a culture of seemingly unceasingly increasing stakes.
As college access professionals, we are asking students to do something terrifying. This is perhaps the most true for first-generation students who are blazing a new and unknown path for themselves and their families, but it is true for just about everyone. This is not just about going to college; it is also about even applying to college. Most adults are not capable of the kinds of self-reflection we ask high school seniors to do on their college applications.
Beneath the surface of every college application and between the lines of every essay prompt, there are much deeper questions that ask students to consider their own sense of worthiness and value, to grapple with their hopes and fears, and to articulate their desires, passions, and weaknesses.
Beneath the surface of every college application and between the lines of every essay prompt, there are much deeper questions that ask students to consider their own sense of worthiness and value, to grapple with their hopes and fears, and to articulate their desires, passions, and weaknesses.
To do all the things that we ask of our students calls for a whole lot of courage, and true courage requires vulnerability. It is not usually my style to recommend TED Talks, but I think that every college access professional should watch and rewatch Brene Brown’s TED Talk on vulnerability. She defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” Many of us can too easily forget the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure students feel all along the college access path. In particular, applying to colleges and scholarships requires students to be vulnerable in a very public way.
This is why Brown’s vulnerability requires courage - the courage to share yourself, to let down your defenses, and to stand without armor. I can think of few better examples of doing this than:
trying to tell your whole life story and represent your range of interests and abilities in a few short essays and a list, then
sharing that with a group of strangers, who appear to hold at least a little piece of your future livelihood in their hands, who will
judge you, usually in under 15 minutes, based on this very incomplete portrait as either accepted, denied, or sort of a little bit of both (waitlisted).
An additional insight of Brown’s is that vulnerability helps us express and experience the range of emotions. College access is not something that can really be coldly, methodically, or clinically undertaken. It is a messy and chaotic rollercoaster of joy and frustration, of doubt and confusion, and almost always a good deal of both triumph and disappointment.
My primary goal as a college access counselor is to create the conditions that will make going through this become an affirming and nurturing process. Not only should the end result of applying to college be empowering and transformational for students, it must be if we are to live our values of equity, inclusion, and belonging in college access. Students should emerge from the college admissions process as a more whole, more fully realized version of themselves. This too is about vulnerability.
Brown’s vulnerability is about allowing yourself to be fully yourself in all your shapes, sizes, and shades. There is a complicated mess of beautiful selves that seep outside the edges of the essays, transcripts, and activities lists. They may not always have a place in the application, but we need to honor the whole of them all along the way.
Tobe Bott-Lyons, PhD is the director of the Upward Bound program at Northern New Mexico College in Española. His current research/practice is focussed on policies and programs to support and expand college access in northern New Mexico. As a practitioner, Tobe has developed and implemented educational, youth, and community development programs in northern NM including: college student success, summer bridge, and first-year experience; college transition and access programs for high school equivalency students; and, rural-serving college access programs.
